I’ve found myself in between two product launches. From AMD we have today’s announcement: the 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition.

Priced at $245, the 965 is a mere clock speed bump, but an important one. It comes at the same price as this spring’s Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition; you get more performance at the same price.

Processor

Clock Speed

un-core Clock

L2 Cache

L3 Cache

TDP

Price

AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE

3.4GHz

2.0GHz

2MB

6MB

140W

$245

AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE

3.2GHz

2.0GHz

2MB

6MB

125W

$245

AMD Phenom II X4 945

3.0GHz

2.0GHz

2MB

6MB

125W

$225

AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE

2.8GHz

2.0GHz

1.5MB

6MB

95W

$145

AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE

3.1GHz

2.0GHz

1MB

6MB

80W

$105

It is also the highest clocked processor AMD has ever shipped; K8 topped out at 3.2GHz and the original Phenom never went beyond 2.6GHz. We're also back up to a 140W TDP, something we haven't seen since the old Phenom 9950 went away.

With the 965 BE, AMD has simplified its product lineup. The 800 series Phenom II X4 is gone, as are the DDR2-only Phenom II X4 940 and 920. Most of the 700 series is also done with. Yields are clearly improving and much of the die harvesting is clearly no longer necessary. AMD ought to get rid of the Xn suffix and just use simple model numbers at this point. For more information on the Phenom II architecture, see our launch article.

The second product launch is rumored to happen next month. It’s the introduction of Intel’s Lynnfield processor. The affordable Nehalem, available in both Core i5 and Core i7 flavors, promises to start at just $199 with motherboards in the low $100s.

Post Your Comment

58 Comments

amd's only hope to beat the i7s is the istambul core, if it brings istambul to the desktop market, I guess this future cpu can beat some high-end i7 processors, and after some revisions on the deneb core, amd will place it to ''fight'' the i5s leaving the athlon x4 playing against the i3s, but most denebs must be at 95W to be efficient against i5. of course this strategy depends if amd is economically capaple of putting a 300mm squared die in the desktop market...deneb is already too large to compete against the i7!
Reply

You measured performance in video encoding and then power consumption under the same test. Why not take the obvious next step to calculate performance/watt and post those results?

And I was quite disappointed to see that you posted only about half of each CPU list on each of those charts - a few chips overlap but many do not so we cannot even do the calculation for ourselves except in less than half the cases. Reply

FarCry 2 is another example of a title well optimized for Intel's architectures and thus we see that the 965BE can't even win against its Q9550 competition. Thankfully for AMD, I do not believe FarCry 2 is representative of the majority of titles on the market.

I believe this is an example of how SSE extentions deliver; but looking at the game benchmark data closer, we see that all cpu's are comparatively the same even the i7's vs Intel Core ll. Most, if not all vendors optimize in Intels favor

Intel's biggest (only?) advantage is hyperthreading; realize Windows 7 had to be optimized (how much more code?)for hyperthreading..how will Intel's i7's react in an openCL, CPUGPU environment (WARP) compared to Phenoms II's and an ATI graphics card, is it cost efficient(less code) and more efficient (faster) to go with CPUGPU over hyper..Will multicores do away with hyperthreading? These current comparisons on vista or XP do not necessary reflect comparisons on Windows 7 or DirectX 11. staytuned Reply

"Now once you start throwing in background tasks and look at future titles being more threaded then the picture becomes a little more muddy"

I dont understand where the writer is going with these conclusions. As CPUGPU or OpenCL begins to take hold, the old comparative model of simply looking at raw speed becomes obsolete, now, overall power can be reduced while concurrent events run parallel in multicores and GPU, thats is where AMD is heading. These comparisons with Vista may not be as eye opening as compared on Windows 7 or DirectX 11, this is where AMD planed to rock and roll from the start. Reply